I’ve been writing life stories since I was a distracted fourth grade student in Mrs. Edinger’s class. Multiplication tables couldn’t hold a candle to what was going on in my head. Since then I’ve published articles in numerous papers and am currently working on my first book. To visit my site, please click here.

This week I almost offered my ten-year old daughter a buck to eat her fruit.And by fruit I mean, two teeny tiny strawberries sliced in cubes a toddler could gulp down and not notice.It was a moment, like many, of weakness and sheer desperation where I delved down deep into my heart of capitalism and nearly paid her for the service of leaving me alone and putting something healthy in her body instead.But something held me back.Maybe it was the image of my son, sitting right next to his sister, wolfing down whatever fruit possible at the speed of sound. Maybe it was the memory of having grown up in a tropical country where fruit played a critical role in my household; very different from the way my daughter sees it today.There were no saran-wrapped watermelons or Styrofoam-packed nectarines, or, God forbid, bag of sliced apples.In Venezuela fruit was readily available at every street corner, dangling off heavy transport trucks or in tiny but cramped fruit shops where it would be regularly purchased and taken home leaving a sweet and delicate fragrance throughout our house.

We used to have a carved out tree stump as our fruit basket.This may sound absurdly large, but it deemed itself necessary, as every week, mom would make her trip to her favorite fruit store, Siempre Fresco (Always Fresh) where the savvy and flirtatious owner would offer her free samples of papaya, mango, or pineapple in order to make his sale, or, as I believed, speak to the pretty gringa lady.

She would return home with bagfuls of tropical delights:pineapple, passion fruit, papaya, mango, guava, carambola, and of course, at least three different kinds of bananas.All of these made their way into my diet, whether as my nanny Yolanda’s famous fruit salad, where she’d meticulously dice each fruit into ¼ inch bites and douse the final product with fresh orange juice, or just simply offered up in slices after a heavy meal.And to my daughter’s credit, I wasn’t always gobbling the stuff up either.There where many moments where I craved God’s gift to Venezuelan children:the candy bar such as Carlton, or a Susy, (both crispy wafers bathed in rich chocolate) instead.

But then I’d hear that warm familiar call from Yolanda, or Yoli, as I’d call her, who’d been busily working in the kitchen as I struggled over algebra homework at the dining room table.I knew whatever she was doing in there had to be something good because by problem number five I was already in a stupor over the distracting aroma emanating from the kitchen: a combination of cinnamon and butterscotch and the sweetness the comes from the earth after a rainstorm.

“Niña!” Yoli would shout.“Ven a comer tu dulce.” I needed few excuses to abandon algebra, but when I heard this command, “Child, come eat your sweets,” all the pieces of the puzzle came together and I understood it could only mean one fantastic thing:I was getting a free trial sample of her famous Baked Bananas.She and I knew that this was meant to be for dinner only, but she and I knew how much we loved to share moments together, especially if it involved food, and more power to it if it temporarily suspended painful tasks such as mathematics.

The lethargy that had guided me through variables of x and y evaporated as quickly as the morning dew on a hot day and I shot my way to the kitchen where Yoli was already ready and waiting for me with a sample of her signature banana dessert.I don’t know how she did it but biting into that dessert always made me melt like butter.The banana was sweet and luscious and oh so comforting, happily swimming in a sauce of butter and rum and cinnamon that had baked into drunken butterscotch perfection.We both knew we had only seconds before La Señora, my mother, would sense my absence in the room next door and come to make sure I was fulfilling my academic duties.But this moment was worth all the risk, with Yoli’s adoring eyes gazing at me as my soul filled with warmth and love and pleasure as I greedily gobbled her amazing baked bananas, inevitably sighing back to that fabulous woman brimming with love and begging her desperately for more, knowing surely my banana plea had given me away and I’d soon find myself facing more horrid algorithms.